For Blood and Empire
by GougeAway
Summary: "Trust no-one." Castiel Novak of the FBI learns this the hard way when he's thrown into a world of deception and corruption through a series of strange and seemingly unexplainable events. Who is committing the string of murders throughout the bureau, and what do they have to do with Director Dick Roman? Can they uncover the truth, or will they all die trying? [TEAM FREE WILL]


**For Blood and Empire**

_Chapter 1_

"Capture him," the brigadier-general had said back at the command centre, her voice like fire and her eyes like steel. "Extreme caution is advised. If he becomes too dangerous, you have permission to shoot - but do not shoot to kill. He is to be captured for interrogation."

A bullet ricocheted from a pipe inches above his head, but there was no time to count his blessings. His fingers clenched on the cold metal of his standard issue handgun; raised, aimed, trigger pulled, and then _crack, bang_, his own bullets drowned in the rain of gunfire. The rest of his unit were scattered around him, their own weapons drawn as they moved in. The wailing sirens of local law enforcement were drawing closer too, the downtown area lit up in blue and red around them.

Someone's bullet made a hit. The cry ripped through the air as the man before them clutched his shoulder and tried to run; turned down a side street and tried to escape through the back alleys. They gave chase - a third of the unit followed directly behind, while the remaining two thirds scattered in an attempt to catch the man at the other potential exits. Castiel ran, his steps light as his tan-coloured trench coat billowed around him. He barely registered the faint splash as his military-issue boots crashed through the shallow puddles of the wet, cobbled streets beneath his feet; took no time to acknowledge the flashing lights reflected in their shine, like beacons in the darkening sky. All that mattered was the man running ahead of him, and the order to arrest him.

The man's name was Steve Wandell. Specifically, he was Lieutenant Steve Wandell, a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and tonight he had made an attempt on the director's life. He was armed and dangerous. It was all Castiel knew, and as his feet pounded against the concrete paths of the twisting alleyways, he decided it was all he needed to know.

Wandell turned, mid-run, and blindly shot a bullet over his shoulder. From somewhere behind him, one of his unit screamed. He turned and saw Captain Bennelli slumped on the ground, blood pooling from a wound on his abdomen, his brown eyes wide and hands shaking. Major Milton, a slender, red-haired young woman of considerable medical expertise, knelt beside him. She looked up at Castiel, her eyes boring into his, and before he could acknowledge the panic in his friend's face, Anna was giving him orders.

"Go," she shouted frantically, "I'll take care of him. Go!" He heard her report the incident on her radio as he turned and ran, rage simmering beneath his skin. This man had so carelessly shot at and injured one of his own colleagues. Castiel had seen horror after horror during his time as an agent, and as a soldier in the wars - and this moment, where he was forced to accept that at any second this lunatic could kill one of his officers, his _comrades_, was one of those horrors. He forced himself to run faster.

He heard the sudden, unmistakeable echo of a gun being fired, and then voices ahead; one of which he realised must be Wandell's, and another he recognised instantly as that of his partner's. Dread flared within him, the terror of not knowing who had fired, until he turned the corner and found them there.

"You're not listening!" Wandell was screaming, hysterical. He knelt on the cobbled pavement, his hands on his head, as Dean Winchester stood over him with a gun pointed at his temple. He looked haggard, his black uniform ruffled and torn in areas, notably beneath his knee and just above his standard issue military boots. A bruise was forming on one of his cheekbones, but there he stood. Relief washed over Castiel - _he's alive, Dean's alive_ - before he moved to stand beside him.

"What's to listen to?" Dean replied flippantly. "You're running around, waving your gun like a crazy son of a bitch, and all this after you try to shoot up the director - the freakin' _director!_ - in his own house, in front of his wife and kid. Now sit tight, while I call in for one of those jackets for you. Y'know the ones, right? Those nice white ones, with the arms that tie up at the back."

"You don't understand!" Wandell screamed, as Dean called in the capture on the radio. Tears streamed from the man's bloodied face, leaving clean streaks of skin on his cheeks. "You don't know what they're doing!"

"Shut up, would you?" Dean replied, impatience growing in his voice. "You can tell us all about it in the cells."

"The cells, Captain? You think they'll let me live? You think you were ever really supposed to capture me?" Wandell screamed, and the despair in his voice was such that even Dean paused to stare down at him, eyebrows furrowed. "They're going to kill me," he sobbed. "You have to listen to me. You know what they made us do, in that war-"

_Screams. Blistering heat. Tears. Shoot to kill. Gunshots. Silence. Silence. Silence. _Castiel blinked away the swirling images in his mind's eye, his head suddenly searing.

"-you know we're just dogs to them! You know what they had us do! It's all-"

A soft _crack_ suddenly sounded in his ears, and before Castiel had time to blink, Steve Wandell lay face down on the ground. A pool of blood formed from the gunshot wound in the back of his head, his black hair wet and matted dark red. Castiel looked to Dean and saw his own shock mirrored in his second-in-command's green eyes.

_What's going on?_ the radio asked, Dean's fingers clenched around it. _Are you in trouble, agent?_ it prompted, and snapped Castiel back into action. He pulled his own radio from his pocket and replied.

"This is Major Novak. Captain Winchester and I have apprehended Wandell. He's dead, and we are uninjured. Send paramedics, please."

_Yes, sir_, came the reply, before the static of the radio cut out completely and they were left alone in the dark of the alley.

"What the hell was that?" Dean asked, kneeling down to inspect Wandell's gunshot wound.

"Sniper," Castiel muttered in reply. He cast his eyes to the rooftops above them in the narrow alleyway, and quickly ruled them out as vantage points for the assailant. At such close range, the bullet would have made a much bigger mess, and he and Dean would likely have detected the sniper in such close proximity - not to mention that the impact would have been deafening, even if a silencer were used. He scanned the immediate area until his eyes rested on the clock tower some hundred feet away. It was the perfect vantage point, and most logical choice.

"One of ours, y'think?" Dean asked.

"We were ordered not to kill him," Castiel replied, "And you had him cornered. He posed no further threat." He stared down at the fallen agent, and then back towards the clock tower, still and ominous against the dark sky. "Why would one of ours kill him?"

"Fair point," Dean said, and Castiel turned his head to look down at his friend. Dean's eyes were narrowed, confusion written in the downturned features of his face, and as he stood up he levelled Castiel with a look; a look Castiel, by now, knew meant _'so what, then?'_

He looked back down at Wandell's body. An ex-soldier, as they all were, reduced to a trigger happy lunatic who had shot at his comrades. Now just a body, lying face down in the dirt and grime of downtown Central City. "He tried to kill the Director of the FBI. He was dangerous. Perhaps this is for the best," he replied, and tried to push down the sinking feeling in his stomach that this should never have happened. Dean's dubious stare was harder to ignore.

* * *

It was midnight before Castiel sat down behind his desk at the command centre, his body aching and tired. He and Dean had been required to give individual statements, as per protocol, and it had taken longer than he had anticipated. He almost groaned at the thought of the reports they now had to write on the case, but nonetheless felt relieved to be back in his own office. The high ceiling, with it's ornate carvings and brass chandeliers, and the panelled, mahogany walls, gave him an odd sense of comfort. Here, he found his place. He was in charge. He knew who he was when he sat here, behind the smooth mahogany surface of the head desk, issuing orders to the members of his small unit. He was no colonel but he was a ranked major, in charge of this particular team, and he was respected within his own squad.

Dean exhaled loudly from his own desk to Castiel's right. The desks were arranged in order of rank, but faced each other in a square shape around the large room - Dean, as his second-in-command, naturally took the desk closest to his own. Across from Dean and on Castiel's other side, at her own desk, sat Lieutenant Jo Harvelle. She was young for such a rank, and despite rumours that she had simply climbed the ladder due to her mother, General Harvelle's influence, Castiel knew that she had earned her place on his team by her own merit alone. She was a bit of a contradiction, in his eyes. Despite her short fuse, she was unnaturally patient, and her rough cynicism was at odds with those large, glittering eyes with which she viewed the world. She was equal parts intelligent and strong, and strove to prove her worth among the older members of the unit.

Unlike Dean, who groaned loudly every time he began writing up a new form, she diligently filed her own report in silence; pausing only occasionally to fix her blonde hair back into the messy bun she typically styled it in, or to covertly steal glances at Dean from beneath her eyelashes. Castiel wondered absently if Dean ever noticed, and concluded that even if he did see the way the young blonde looked at him, there was nothing Dean could do about it anyway. Dean had a wife and a son. That aside, the bureau had strict laws prohibiting fraternisation between superiors and subordinates.

Sometimes, though, Castiel caught him watching her too.

To Jo's left sat 2nd Lieutenant Ash Miles at his own mahogany desk. Ash was, in Castiel's and the rest of the unit's eyes, nothing short of a genius. He already looked to be more than half-way through his own report, the rapid scratching of his pen against the paper providing the soundtrack for the rest of the night. His brown hair, long by male standards, brushed against his shoulders as he wrote, and not for the first time Castiel wondered how he had been able to keep his hair such a length when it defied uniform. Every now and then Ash would abruptly stop writing, only to pull out a rumpled sheet of paper from somewhere beneath the mountain of paperwork that had become his desk, and then absent-mindedly draw crude doodles on it. A genius, they all said, but strangely idiotic at the same time.

Finally, across from Ash's desk and closest to the large double doors, Officer Kevin Tran slept soundly with his dark head in his arms. His young features were illuminated by the white-blue light of his laptop screen, but he did not stir. He was a slight young man, younger only than Jo and fresh out of the academy. However, what Kevin lacked in field experience, he more than made up for in his contributions to investigations. Like Ash, Kevin was an invaluable asset to the team in terms of his keen, analytical mind, and Jo often had the two pair up on cases she deemed, in her own words, "too X-Files" for her to be concerned with. In many ways he was the 'baby' of the group, a fact he both knew and somewhat resented.

Kevin let out a particularly loud snore, only to be greeted by a crumpled ball of paper to the face from Ash's direction. He stirred, a frown setting on the young features of his face, before he opened his eyes blearily and settled a glare at Ash. "The hell was that for, Mullet?"

Ash shrugged in reply. "I didn't want you to suffocate."

"How would I have suffocated?"

"Because I would have strangled you if you'd kept snoring like that," Ash replied seriously. Dean chuckled as he wrote his report, while Jo rolled her eyes, only the barest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

"Miles, lay off. Tran, wake up and finish your report. Both of you, for that matter," she added.

"Yes, ma'am," Kevin replied, while Ash shot her a half-hearted salute from his desk beside her, before the room was once again filled with the sounds of pen on paper and the tapping of laptop keys.

* * *

"Permission to speak freely, sir," Jo asked him. The streets of the city were mostly deserted at this time of night. They had left the command centre now, their reports finally completed after what felt like hours. Officer Tran had been the first to head home, his own report being significantly shorter than the others due to his limited involvement in the case past the information gathering process. 2nd Lieutenant Miles had been next, finishing his report relatively quickly, throwing a lazy salute over his shoulder as he bid them goodnight. Castiel left with Dean and Jo around forty minutes later, all weary and looking forward to getting back to their respective homes. Dean had saluted them with a weary smile at the corner of Bachman Road, a twinkle in his eye despite the tired look on his face. They said their goodbyes as he turned to make his way home to the West Side, where his four year old son would be asleep in his bed, and his wife would no doubt have left the hall light on for him.

Castiel walked on beside Jo. "Permission granted, Lieutenant. " Both lived in the East Side of Central, and although he would never tell her so, he didn't like the thought of her walking home alone this late at night. She probably knew, of course, but was too proud to broach the subject.

"Sir, did you know Lieutenant Wandell?" she asked. The question seemed to catch in her throat, and when Castiel looked down at her, he saw her regret in the downturned corners of her mouth and the dulled look in her brown eyes. It was one of the things about Joanna Harvelle that was so unsuitable for an officer, but which he greatly admired about her as a person - that she wore her emotions so plainly on her face. She did not hide from them. She embraced them, and in a strange way, she was a better soldier for it.

"No, Lieutenant," he replied. "I didn't know him personally." The sky, once black and smattered with glittering stars, had begun to lighten since they had left Central Command. The breath that escaped their lungs misted before them in the chill night air. "I understand you did?"

"We trained at the academy together, sir," Jo answered. "We served together in the war." Her voice cracked when she said that last word, and Castiel pretended not to notice. He couldn't stand to say that word any more than she could. "We were friends, sir."

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant," he told her, and he meant it when he saw her eyes shine with unshed tears. "There was nothing we could have done."

"I know, Major," she smiled softly at him, and it was so genuine in it's sad acceptance that it only made him feel worse. "I just don't understand why. Can't you tell me anything?" she asked him, and the devastation in her tone was almost enough to break him.

"There's nothing to tell, Lieutenant," he answered, and hated himself for the ice laced throughout his words; hated himself suddenly for the blood stains on his hands that he could never be rid of. "He tried to kill Director Roman. He was mentally unstable, and nothing could be done."

They walked in silence after that.

* * *

A/N: Let me say, right off the bat, that this story is so heavily inspired by X Files and Fullmetal Alchemist.

Also, some explanation may be needed in terms of this version of the FBI. In this story, the FBI is a military based organisation, as is the police force. However, the police force consists of privates, corporals, sergeants, and sergeant-majors. Any higher rank is FBI. In fact, this entire story is set in a strange alternate reality. That's not totally important, but the world will reveal itself to you in flashes as the story progresses.

Also OH MY GOD JO IS IN THE STORY I FINALLY WROTE HER IN A STORY OH MY GOD

Every other character you've ever seen in Supernatural will make appearances too. Hopefully that's enough to keep you reading, or at least grab your attention until the next chapter.


End file.
